They're not talking about replacing an entire runway. It was a military attack and the goal would be to patch the runway for use as quickly as possible. Not pass a FAA inspection.
"The Tomahawk, in service since the 1980s, is a long-range cruise missile, able to be launched from land, air, or sea from over 1,000 miles away. With its 1,000 pound explosive warhead, it’s effective at blowing things up like buildings (or in the case of the Tomahawk cluster bomb variant, people) from a far distance, without putting anyone from the attacking party in harm’s way.
But the problem with a runway—a vast, flat expanse of concrete—is that it’s pretty hard to render it inoperable for a long amount of time. Even if a Tomahawk directly impacted the runway, it would just make a big hole in the ground. And a hole in the ground is easily defeated by a few people with a bulldozer that can just fill it back up pretty quickly.
What you need to truly knock an airfield out of commission for a substantial amount of time is something like the French-made BLU-107 anti-runway penetration bomb, also known as the Matra Durandal. And the Durandal is very good at knocking a runway out, as GlobalSecurity.org explains:
Once the parachute-retarded low-level drop bomb attains a nose-down attitude, it fires a rocket booster that penetrates the runway surface, and a delayed explosion buckles a portion of the runway. It can penetrate up to 40 centimeters of concrete, creating a 200 square meter crater causing damage more difficult to repair than the crater of a general-purpose bomb.
It not only creates a crater in the runway, it also completely messes up the concrete slabs of a runway themselves, which creates a much more painstaking repair process."
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/why-firing-tomahawk-missiles-at-syria-was-a-nearly-usel-1794113103
No Assad is not aligned with ISIS. His soldiers are liberating towns from ISIS.
